My Warwick Life: Graham Crump

The My Warwick Life feature gives an insight into staff and students’ lives at Warwick, considering both their work and social life on campus. This week we hear from Graham Crump, Executive Development Chef, Warwick Conferences.

There’s no such thing as a typical day, but, in a nutshell, my job involves…

planning menus, developing dishes and recipes, discussing dietary requirements and liaising with directors, senior managers and chefs across campus to offer advice and support. I also undertake planning for the long term catering needs of the University, taking into account the continual growth of the campus, looking at what is in and out of food fashion.

I had a really useful meeting recently with…

Dr Tim White, Principal Teaching Fellow, School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies. Tim is a foodie who is running a programme for final year students relating to food and performance. He wanted my support as a catering professional, offering guidance and support to the students.

It would be really useful to work more closely with…

students, to support them in understanding basic food hygiene and nutrition. It must be very daunting to be away from home for the first time and having to provide food for themselves.

I recently attended a conference called…

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. It was a fascinating conference, bringing together all people interested in food and related topics. There was a really interesting mix of writers, scientists, cooks, chefs and researchers. This year’s topic was all about ‘Celebration’ and reviewed all forms of celebration around the world, past and present.

I'm really enjoying working on…

developing new food offers/dishes and possible future concepts, along with ‘molecular gastronome and modern techniques’.

Warwick's unique because…

it has a great blend of commercial and academic activities that all strive to make Warwick the best. There’s a great team of people that generally get along well.

The best thing about working at Warwick is…

working with a great team! It’s always a challenge having thousands of food critics across campus.

I'm really glad I got involved with…

Warwick’s links with local educational establishments. I’ve become involved with giving career talks in schools that includes cookery demonstrations and, more importantly, provides the opportunity for students to come on campus and experience working in the catering operations to consider catering as a career.

I recently had lunch at…

GUSTO in the Arts Centre. Having been heavily involved with the set up and development of the food, I needed to see it from a customer’s point of view.

If I could change one thing about the University, it would be…

the speed of decision making, although it’s common sense to take time to make the ‘right’ decision, from an operational point of view it seems to take forever.

I usually travel to campus by…

car, and occasionally on motorbike if the weather is good. We would all like to use public transport, but living where I live it would take me forever to get here.

If you'd like to be featured in a future My Warwick Life piece, please email internalcomms@warwick.ac.uk and we'll email the questions out to you.